The 13 Best Literary Adaptations of 2022 ‹ Literary Hub – Literary Hub

Well, it’s mid-December, 2022—how are we all doing? Sick, right? Yeah, we’re all sick. Not even necessarily with Covid, though it sure feels like Covid’s fault. If you, like me, are stuck in bed, wondering what to do with yourself, too discombobulated even to read, why not treat yourself to one of the year’s best literary adaptations? From serious to sweet, weighty in order to wackadoo, there’s a little something for everybody on this list, personally recommended by the Fictional Hub staff:

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Netflix)
Based on: The particular Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

I truly can’t praise this film enough. I expected to love it upon a production level—del Toro is a master associated with practical effects, and I couldn’t wait in order to see his puppets get the stop-motion treatment—but I hadn’t really considered the potential of the story level, mostly because I have no love for the 1940 Disney version of Carlo Collodi’s story (and I didn’t even bother with Disney’s new live action version, despite the particular Tom Hanks bait).

But I should have known better: del Toro showed me his story sensibilities in Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape associated with Water (among others, but those are the most relevant comps here) — which is to say that of course there’s darkness, of course there are fascists, obviously there is a tremendous amount of grief. Del Toro’s Pinocchio is set inside Mussolini-era Italy, and he has much to say about dictators and puppetry, regarding fatherhood and the pressures associated with parental expectations, about spirituality and the gift/curse of life. It’s life affirming and visually stunning—one associated with my favorite films from the year, perhaps of all time.

–Eliza Smith, special projects editor

Bones plus All
Based on: Bones & All simply by Camille DeAngelis

An adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’s recent novel, Luca Guadagnino’s teenage cannibal road movie Bone fragments and All , is in my opinion, one of the most fascinating movies of the particular year. It is the spooky, lonely fable about two young runaways (who happen to have inherent cannibalistic urges) wander together through the impoverished backwaters associated with 1980s Midwest America together, trying in order to find a shred of community after feeling alienated from mainstream society, and dealing along with loneliness, guilt, and self-loathing. And it features an unrecognizably scary Michael Stuhlbarg.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads associate editor

Deep Water  (Hulu)
Based on: Deep Water   by Patricia Highsmith

Critics, audiences, awards juries, and perhaps even your own brain after watching will tell you that Deep Drinking water —the Ben Affleck- and Ana de Armas-starring adaptation associated with Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel of marital warfare plus psychosexual obsession—is not the good movie. Don’t listen to those voices. The first directorial outing in twenty years from octogenarian King of the Erotic Thrillers Adrian Lyne ( 9½ Weeks , Fatal Attraction , Unfaithful ), Heavy Water has too many wonderful ingredients to not be delicious. Or, at the very least, edible.

You’ve got de Armas as Melinda, a bombastically carnal wife who flaunts her young lovers all over town. You have Affleck as Vic, a chillingly calm cuckold husband that collects snails and casually admits in order to murdering Melinda’s boy toys. You’ve got an increasingly manic Tracy Letts playing the crime writer neighbor with a burning, and tremendously ill-advised, desire to catch Vic in the act. You have a cute-as-a-button kid who closes out the particular film with a small back seat of the car musical number. Sex, snails, cute children, Lil Rel Howery, boozy Louisiana house parties that will end in “tragedy”—it’s all here. Ben as shifty, shitheel husband also happens to be one of my personal favorite Bens, so I would argue that Deep Water is worth watching for his micro expressions plus line deliveries alone.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor in chief

Bullet Train
Based on: Maria Beetle (Bullet Train) simply by Kōtarō Isaka

I’ll say upfront that Bullet Train suffers from the Deadpool -ification of action movies—it’s a little too crass, too irreverent, too stupid in places. But it is also 1 of the particular most fun times I’ve had at the movies. Some days, you want to watch a movie that’s the psychedelic head trip and also a complicated, bottled-up action movie, and also a funny and heartwarming movie regarding relationships. It could have been retitled “Punch Buggy” and that would possess worked. It is like if the Rainbow Road setting on Mario Kart had Matrix -inspired fight scenes and also Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Hiroyuki Sanada. It’s not a faithful adaptation associated with Kōtarō Isaka’s contained, pressure-cooker novel. Yet it’s the kind of movie you will scream-laugh too. Which is a thing that people need sometimes!

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads associate publisher

Heartstopper (Netflix)
Depending on:   Heartstopper   by Alice Oseman

Never before has a show so perfectly captured the feeling of having the crush: the embarrassment, the particular teasing you endure through your friends, the daydreaming, the Instagram stalking, the close reading into every interaction, the particular wondering if they might possibly like a person back!! Set at an all-boys high school, this particular series centers around Charlie (Joe Locke) and Nick (Kit Connor)—two new buddies who are usually obviously destined to get with each other. It’s a tale because old while time: Charlie is the nerd, plus Nick will be a jock. Charlie’s been bullied for being gay for months, but he’s got good friends by their side and is sure of who he is. Meanwhile, Nick (cool kid/star from the rugby team) is still coming to terms with his own sexuality. In eight short episodes, we watch them navigate the trials and tribulations associated with first really like.

Adapted from  Alice Oseman’s graphic novels   of the same name, the particular Netflix show pays homage to the source material through bursts of animation: heart doodles, bolts associated with electricity that will pass between two bodies that want in order to touch. It’s exhilarating! There’s something about the innocence of the illustrated sparks that really got me personally; it’s a pure love that you want to endure! These are characters to root for. Although they obviously have their hardships, I really need in order to underscore how much  joy there is in this show: among new partners and old friends alike. It’s the heartwarming coming-of-age love story—one that you’ll surely view in one sitting. Even though we all know how the particular story is going to go, you will find yourself holding your breath and sensation butterflies right alongside all of them. And if almost all of this hasn’t already been convincing enough, Olivia Colman is also in it.

–Katie Yee, associate publisher

White Noise
Based on: White Noise   by Don DeLillo

Noah Baumbach’s White Noise is a well-equipped, unafraid adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “ take upon the endlessly distorted, religious underside associated with American consumerism . ” The book White Sound is a midnight A& P shopping trip run of a book—it is a shopping cart full associated with STUFF—but Baumbach is a smart plus literate filmmaker, and proves very adept at braiding together the wackier allegories of DeLillo’s epic along with the arresting and even terrifying realities that his characters’ face without wavering in pace, tone, or direction.

The particular performances within the film are exemplary; as J. A. K. Gladney, Adam Driver gives one of his most mesmerizing performances as a hero of an overdone and often stupid culture, and Greta Gerwig is equally delightful, playing a character whose calculated stiffness cracks into tremendous emotion. Don Cheadle (perhaps the most versatile actor working today) pops up chipperly at the particular perfect moments, while Sam and May Nivola ( Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer’s kids ) are pitch-perfect as the Gladneys’ hyper-competent plus formal kids. Also, the LCD Soundsystem song that the band wrote for the film needs to win a good Academy Award.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads associate editor

Pachinko (Apple TV+)
Depending on: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Apple TV’s series based on Min Jin Lee’s adored, bestselling novel makes an excellent case for the particular literary version. I was struck again and again simply by the emotional performances—what I had felt thus deeply reading through Pachinko took on a good even deeper tenor when seeing these characters reside out the storyplot, and alternating between timelines (rather than following the decades-spanning chronology from the book) highlighted even more the particular disconnect in between generations. The cinematography is usually gorgeous, “somehow deriving breathtaking beauty out of the brutal reality, ” like Juhea Kim writes inside her review. Pachinko ’s been renewed for a second season, so there’s more to come, including the best opening credits sequence on TV right now.

–Eliza Smith, unique projects manager

Confess, Fletch
Dependent on:   Confess, Fletch , by Gregory McDonald

Confess, Fletch is a movie associated with epic coolness and smoothness featuring Jon Hamm in his best role in a long period. An adaptation of Gregory Mcdonald’s novel from 1976, it is a wisecracking but tight mystery about an art heist in Italia and the murder within America (Boston), and the suave-but-goofball American ex-journalist waltzing through the investigation. On Twitter, Dan McCoy noted that will “In another era, Confess, Fletch would be one of those movies that became a beloved classic by stumbling over it on TBS on a Saturday over the course of several years, ” and that is exactly right. It is the kind of film you watch at 4 pm on a weekend. We need more movies like this particular. And fortunately, there’s going to be a sequel!

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads associate editor

Fleishman is in Trouble (Hulu)
Based on: Fleishman is definitely in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Watching an adaptation of a book you loved is nearly always a recipe for disappointment, but in the case of Fleishman Is in Trouble , the series was not only as gripping, funny, and devastating since the novel, it actually deepened my understanding of and appreciation for the particular source material. (It likely helped that the book’s author, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, was credited as writer for the majority of typically the episodes. ) The series features standout performances from Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes because Toby plus Rachel Fleishman, whose acrimonious divorce precedes the action. The show takes its time exploring this demise of the relationship in flashbacks, which are as affecting as they are painful to watch (particularly often the ones that will involve Rachel’s struggles with postpartum depression). This is a moving, deceptively sharp portrayal associated with parenthood, partnerhood, ambition, in addition to the sacrifices each demands of us.

–Jessie Gaynor, senior publisher

Catherine Called Birdy
Based on: Catherine, Called Birdy   by Karen Cushman

I’m sorry that this is obviously so cheesy to express, but my heart soared during Catherine Called Birdy, Lena Dunham’s adaptation regarding Karen Cushman’s beloved 1994 YA novel about the preteen girl in Medieval England who refuses to suffer an arranged marriage. No preventative hijinks are beneath her, and even this makes for very entertaining cinema. Bella Ramsay is a perfect heroine—equal parts pathos together with shenanigans. And where did Andrew Scott get of which ROBE? You know the one. I want this.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads associate editor

Kindred (FX, Hulu)
Dependent on:   Kindred   by Octavia Butler

FX’s adaptation [of Octavia Butler’s Kindred ] had rather large shoes to fill: it needed to be faithful, in some ways, to your admonitory spirit of Butler’s work, but it also would have to try to avoid committing the exact very sin that Butler was afraid of: simply retraumatizing viewers with an unending display of Black people being beaten and additionally brutalized. Plus, by placing Dana in the present day, rather than the 1970s of the book, it would have to contend with the new technologies that have come to define the American present with regard to those with the means in order to afford them, and how this might interact with the spectacle of a new Black woman appearing in the present with grievous wounds on her body, especially when facing white cops—whose white faces remind her all too awfully of the particular slave masters she had temporarily escaped.

Overall, I think the new show succeeds in trying to walk an almost impossibly difficult line between on-screen trauma and fidelity to a number of core aspects of the book, with scintillating performances by its main actors—but there are also a few peculiar, if not outright inscrutable, changes, which I am still unsure how to be able to feel about.

…

Kindred   has  long been a special book to me —painful but pedagogic, a text from which I can never quite forget certain images. Like Dana, the reader can’t reemerge as they were when they started; instead, the story leaves an eerie, phantasmal  what if   in you, unsettling as a whisper you hear within an empty room. FX’s adaptation doesn’t resonate since deeply with me, but it’s undeniably trying, overall, to speak to Butler’s memorializing work. At the end of the day, the best way for you to consider this new  Kindred is as just that: something new, inspired simply by Butler’s masterpiece. In its own way, this series is reclaiming that grim fantasy for any new era. And while I possess some reservations, Im excited—and necessarily bracing myself—to see what painful wonders may come next.

Read our critic’s full review here.

–Gabrielle Bellot, staff author

Women Talking
Depending on:   Women Talking   by simply Miriam Toews

Sarah Polley’s adaptation involving Miriam Toews’s somber, charged novel about women inside a Mennonite community that collectively gather in typically the hayloft connected with a farm to address the systemic sexual abuse perpetrated upon them by means of the men of this colony, is riveting not to mention crammed with impressive performances through Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Ben Whishaw, August Winter, Michelle McLeod, Kate Hallett and Liv McNeil. It is some sort of true ensemble film and also feels often like a play—a brave as well as compelling story about women who decide not to accept what they are told they must.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads associate editor

Conversations With Friends (Hulu)
Based on: Conversations along with Friends by Sally Rooney

We can’t say it’s the proudest moment, choosing Discussions with Buddies as my favorite adaptation from the year—a show I watched in May, and can barely remember. But maybe that’s a compliment, because every other adaptation I actually watched ( Death on often the Nile, The Staircase, Lady Chatterley’s Lover , to help name a few abysmal options) I remember viscerally, and not for good reasons. Sure, Conversations is quiet, a little boring, Frances is more annoying than I keep in mind her being in your book, and am expected Sasha Lane while Bobbi to be a bit cooler, but at the end of the day, they had been deeply true to the exact material, plus succeeded at depicting the sort of stilted, unexpected partnership that occurs between Chip and Frances.

Nick in addition to Frances are usually the unobtrusive betas in their respective relationships, Nick together with Melissa, Frances with Bobbi, the ones who theoretically would never cheat, the ones whose needs go vaguely unnoticed, until these people saw something of themselves reflected inside each other. Joe Alwyn (who may know a little something regarding playing second fiddle) has been a spot-on Nick, and even Jemima Kirke is a good joy always—if not revelatory, Conversations using Friends will be an adaptation in the purest method, loyal to the source, and thorough in the knowledge of the particular fickle behaviors of the heart.

–Julia Hass, contributing publisher

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